British
administrators or to promote political reforms by constitutional
methods, that Indians of all creeds, including the Hindus, should begin
by reforming their own social institutions, and bring them into greater
harmony with Western standards. Tilak, a Chitpavan Brahman of
considerable erudition, who had graduated with honours at Bombay, had,
however, inherited his full share of Chitpavan hostility to British
ascendency. He was also by temperament and ambition impatient of all
restraint, and jealous of the commanding authority which a man like
Ranade owed quite as much to the nobility of his character as to his
social position and force of intellect. In opposition to Ranade, with
whom he had at first co-operated as an educationist, Tilak drifted
rapidly into the reactionary camp. The battle was first engaged over the
control of the Poona Sarvajanik Sabha and the Education Society, two
progressive associations which, though mainly composed of Brahmans,
included a sprinkling of Mahomedans and of non-Brahman Hindus. Tilak had
thrown himself into journalism, and after the repeal of the Indian Press
Law on the return of a Liberal Administration to office at home in 1881,
he had been amongst the first to revive the incendiary methods which it
had temporarily and very successfully checked. His first onslaught upon
Ranade's position, however, failed, and instead of supplanting him, it
was he who was compelled in 1890 to sever his connexion with the
Education Society.

Tilak's defeat was short lived. The introduction of the Age of Consent
Bill, in 1890, to mitigate the evils of Hindu child-marriage, gave him a
fresh opening. Ranade, discouraged and alarmed by the violence of the
Tilak party, had by this time retired from the forefront of the fray,
but in Dr. Bhandarkar, Mr. Justice Tilang, Mr. A.K. Nulkar, Mr. (now Sir
N.G.) Chandavarkar, and other courageous Hindu reformers, with whom Mr.
Gokhale was always ready to co-operate against the forces of religious
superstition, he had left disciples ready to carry on the good fight.
Tilak raised against them a storm of passion and prejudice. In the
columns of the _Kesari_, of which he had become sole proprietor, he
denounced every Hindu who supported the measure as a renegade and a
traitor to the cause of Hinduism, and thus won the support of
conservative orthodoxy, which had hitherto viewed with alarm some of his
literary excursions into the field of Vedantic exegesis. With the